When it was first published in 2010, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book was heralded as a groundbreaking illustrated history of Indigenous activism and resistance in the Americas over the previous 500 years, from contact to present day. Eleven years later, author and artist Gord Hill has revised and expanded the book, which is now available in color for the first time. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book powerfully portrays flashpoints in history when Indigenous peoples have risen up and fought back against colonizers and other oppressors. Events depicted include the the Spanish conquest of the Aztec, Mayan and Inca empires; the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico; the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890; the resistance of the Great Plains peoples in the 19th century; and more recently, the Idle No More protests supporting Indigenous sovereignty and rights in 2012 and 2013, and the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. With strong, plain language and evocative illustrations, this revised and expanded edition of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book reveals the tenacity and perseverance of Indigenous peoples as they endured 500-plus years of genocide, massacre, torture, rape, displacement, and assimilation: a necessary antidote to conventional histories of the Americas. The book includes a foreword by Pamela Palmater, a Mi'kmaq lawyer, professor, and political commentator.
Mention "American Indian," and the first image that comes to most people's minds is likely to be a figment of the American mass media: A war-bonneted chief. The Land O' Lakes maiden. Most American Indians in the twenty-first century live in urban areas, so why do the mass media still rely on Indian imagery stuck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How can more accurate views of contemporary Indian cultures replace such stereotypes? These and similar questions ground the essays collected in American Indians and the Mass Media, which explores Native experience and the mainstream media's impact on American Indian histories, cultures, and communities.
Chronicling milestones in the relationship between Indians and the media, some of the chapters employ a historical perspective, and others focus on contemporary practices and new technologies. All foreground American Indian perspectives missing in other books on mass communication. The historical studies examine treatment of Indians in America's first newspaper, published in seventeenth-century Boston, and in early Cherokee newspapers; Life magazine's depictions of Indians, including the famous photograph of Ira Hayes raising the flag at Iwo Jima; and the syndicated feature stories of Elmo Scott Watson. Among the chapters on more contemporary issues, one discusses campaigns to change offensive place-names and sports team mascots, and another looks at recent movies such as Smoke Signals and television programs that are gradually overturning the "movie Indian" stereotypes of the twentieth century.
Particularly valuable are the essays highlighting authentic tribal voices in current and future media. Mark Trahant chronicles the formation of the Native American Journalists Association, perhaps the most important early Indian advocacy organization, which he helped found. As the contributions on new media point out, American Indians with access to a computer can tell their own stories--instantly to millions of people--making social networking and other Internet tools effective means for combating stereotypes.
Including discussion questions for each essay and an extensive bibliography, American Indians and the Mass Media is a unique educational resource.
The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon's birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, Neshnabé pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history.
"A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives." --Booklist, starred review
In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, and fiction to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?
When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, gave them a list. This list became a book club and then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then this book. The writers in Bad Indians Book Club refuse to let dominant stories displace their own and resist the way wemitigoozhiwag--European settlers--craft the prevailing narrative and decide who they are.
In Bad Indians Book Club, we examine works about history, science, and gender as well as fiction, all written from the perspective of "Bad Indians"--marginalized writers whose refusal to comply with dominant narratives opens up new worlds. Interlacing chapters with short stories about Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where the stories of marginalized writers help us imagine other ways of seeing the world. As Krawec did for her friend, she recommends a list of books to fill in the gaps on our own bookshelves and in our understanding.
Becoming Kin, which novelist Omar El Akkad called a "searing spear of light," led readers to talk back to the histories they had received. Now, in Bad Indians Book Club comes a potent challenge to all the stories settler colonialism tells--stories that erase and appropriate, deny and deflect. Following Deer Woman, who is shaped by the profuse artistry of Krawec, we enter the multiple worlds Indigenous and other subaltern stories create. Together we venture to the edges of worlds waiting to be born.
Included in the Lakota People's Law Project Decolonized Reading List for 2025
We find our way forward by going back.
The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."
Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.
This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.
Winner of the Reading the West Book Award
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award
A People Best Memoir of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year Selection
A Book Riot Best Book of the Year
"I'm in awe of Chris La Tray's storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories."--Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother's consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.
When La Tray attended his grandfather's funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. "Who were they?" he wondered, and "Why was I never allowed to know them?" Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family's past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities--as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition.
Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray's remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.
Rooted in visions of Indigenous futurisms, Beyond the Glittering World proclaims and celebrates a rising generation of storytellers.
"A magnificent opus my heart hears in whispers and lee-lees, every chord resonating truths." --ANGELINE BOULLEY, Sisters in the Wind
The collection brings together twenty-two emerging and established women, two-spirit people, and people of marginalized genders who immerse readers in poems, stories, and worlds that challenge and delight. From a museum heist 177 years in the making, to lyrical explorations of love and loss, to a tale where language itself becomes the force that saves the land, this boundary-breaking, genre-bending anthology illuminates the power of Indigenous voices.
"A magnificent opus my heart hears in whispers and lee-lees, every chord resonating truths." --ANGELINE BOULLEY, Sisters in the Wind
The collection brings together twenty-two emerging and established women, two-spirit people, and people of marginalized genders who immerse readers in poems, stories, and worlds that challenge and delight. From a museum heist 177 years in the making, to lyrical explorations of love and loss, to a tale where language itself becomes the force that saves the land, this boundary-breaking, genre-bending anthology illuminates the power of Indigenous voices.
The compelling teen nonfiction account of how two heritages united in their struggle to gain freedom and equality in America.The first paths to freedom taken by runaway slaves led to Native American villages. There, black men and women found acceptance and friendship among our country's original inhabitants. Though they seldom appear in textbooks and movies, the children of Native and African American marriages helped shape the early days of the fur trade, added a new dimension to frontier diplomacy, and made a daring contribution to the fight for American liberty. Since its original publication, William Loren Katz's Black Indians has remained the definitive work on a long, arduous quest for freedom and equality. This new edition features a new cover and includes updated information about a neglected chapter in American history.
Windy Girl is blessed with a vivid imagination. From Uncle she gathers stories of long-ago traditions, about dances and sharing and gratitude. Windy can tell such stories herself–about her dog, Itchy Boy, and the way he dances to request a treat and how he wriggles with joy in response to, well, just about everything.
When Uncle and Windy Girl and Itchy Boy attend a powwow, Windy watches the dancers in their jingle dresses and listens to the singers. She eats tasty food and joins family and friends around the campfire. Later, Windy falls asleep under the stars. Now Uncle's stories inspire other visions in her head: a bowwow powwow, where all the dancers are dogs. In these magical scenes, Windy sees veterans in a Grand Entry, and a visiting drum group, and traditional dancers, grass dancers, and jingle-dress dancers–all with telltale ears and paws and tails. All celebrating in song and dance. All attesting to the wonder of the powwow.
This playful story by Brenda Child is accompanied by a companion retelling in Ojibwe by Gordon Jourdain and brought to life by Jonathan Thunder's vibrant dreamscapes. The result is a powwow tale for the ages.